Wednesday, November 10, 2010

Once your leaves turn.

Different weather falls down upon people on the single same day, and that's strange. Seasons change faster in some places than with others, and that's strange. That's strange. But what's strangest is that it's all the same; winter is comin'.

--

Reading Aristotle and the end(s) of human nature as social, yet private, beings. It is strange how home means to you when you leave it behind. It continues to exist, maybe glowing a little, in your memory. But when the home left behind no longer houses the ones that made it, it does not seem fit to be called a home any longer for those behind. I don't know if there is a word for that state when one still remains, a kind of complete inverse--nostalgia is always for something that can not be returned to, but what is that, then, for the one that is left, who has not left. Some kind of desert, quaking familiarity.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Perhaps the correct word is "persistence," for when someone realizes that they have stopped behind while the rest would move on, they would like to think that it is for a valuable reason rather than for fear of movement. Whether it is truely for a solid purpose or for fear remains to be determined by the situation. Attention to word choice has a powerful way of letting people justify their decisions, oder? If only to themselves.

Scott Herder said...

Persistence is a really close word to what I'm thinking of, but maybe it depends on the connotations that it's carrying. Sometimes it's used in a negative light, sometimes positive--and when I was writing that out I was feeling as though that kind of "home without the hominess" is something very melancholic.